Yuletide Mechanical Omnibus Recollections
During the first lockdown, nearly two years ago now, I stumbled upon an article by the BBC’s then Arts Editor Will Gompertz which sung the praises of EM Forster’s 1909 short story ‘The Machine Stops’ and its immense prescience for our current predicament. Impressed by his review, I added it to my wish list and thought little else about it until this Christmas, when the least tech savvy of all my grandparents ordered it as a present for me. Suffice to say, I’d almost forgotten about it. The story concerns a woman - Vashti - living in a never ending network of tunnels and pods below the Earth’s surface, not only disconnected from her home, but disconcertingly uninterested in it. Instead, to the disgust of her son Kuno, she begins to worship ‘The Machine’, seeing it as not just an omnipotent tool of God, but God itself, responsible for all the innovation and ‘advances’ humanity has seemingly made whilst trapped underground. Her son, in turn, is restless with this imprisonment and vows